Public Media Policybase

Key documents about public media in the United States

A key definition of noncommercial/public TV and radio: Federal law gives some preferential treatment to public radio and TV stations and requires them in turn to remain “noncommercial.”

Sec. 399b of the Communications Act, as amended, says: “No public broadcast station may make its facilities available to any person for the broadcasting of any advertisement.” Ads are messages “transmitted in exchange for any remuneration” … “that are intended”:

(1) to promote any service, facility, or product offered by any person who is engaged in such offering for profit;
(2) to express the views of any person with respect to any matter of public importance or interest; or
(3) to support or oppose any candidate for political office.

By defining “advertisements,” the law also describes by contrast the permissible noncommercial kinds of paid announcements that have come to be called an “underwriting” credits.

“No promotional announcements on behalf of for profit entities shall be broadcast at any time in exchange for the receipt, in whole or in part, of consideration to the licensee, its principals, or employees. However, acknowledgements of contributions can be made.”

Indeed, Sec. 73.1212requires stations to identify program underwriters (and advertisers, on commercial stations), because, as the commission explained in its 1970 order (paragraph 2), the public has a right to know “by whom it is being persuaded.”

“These interpretations of Commission policy and rules present issues of importance, since on the one hand they affect the financial support of educational broadcast stations, and on the other hand they pertain to the public’s right to know by whom it is being persuaded. At the same time they affect the essential noncommercial character of these services which permits them to fulfill the unique and important role in onr society which they do.”

More recently the commission summarized its rules on its website:

“Noncommercial educational stations may acknowledge contributions over the air, but they may not broadcast commercials or otherwise promote the goods and services of for-profit donors or underwriters. Acceptable “enhanced underwriting” acknowledgements of for-profit donors or underwriters may include:
(1) logograms and slogans that identify but do not promote;
(2) location information;
(3) value-neutral descriptions of a product line or service; and
(4) brand names, trade names, and product service listings.
However, such acknowledgements may not interrupt the station’s regular programming.”

Examples of violations: The FCC doesn’t find or punish many broadcasters. Most enforcements involve small noncomm licensees, including religious stations, and few cite large pubcasters. Examples of two that did:

New York’s WNYC aired an underwriting credit for the executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International in 2003-04 that “exceeded the bounds of what is permissible.” It agreed to pay $5,000 to the FCC, to continue staff training and multilevel review of credits, attempt to review national credits before broadcast, and to file periodic compliance reports.

In 1997, the FCC charged Chicago’s WTTW with underwriting violations, but the commission dropped three of the four charges and reduced the fine in 2000.

Paid political advertisements on noncomm stations are among the ads prohibited by FCC rules, though in 2012 a federal appeals court ruled that noncommercial stations can carry political ads. The decision did not create a binding national precedent. The Ninth Circuit was considering maverick San Francisco station KMTP’s appeal of FCC fines imposed in 2002 for “willful and repeated broadcast of approximately 1,911 prohibited ads,” not all political ones.

Gradual loosening of underwriting rules: Though the laws and FCC rules on underwriting have seldom been as specific and unrestrictive as many public broadcasters wanted, they generally have moved from tighter to looser, often addressing practical problems encountered by stations:

May 6, 1970: FCC order homogenizes previously separate underwriting rules for radio and TV. It asserts that underwriting donations should cover partial station operating expenses and not just program production costs.

Logos in underwriting: Congress also amended the law to loosen underwriting rules. Sec. 399a of the Communications Act permits underwriting credits to include “aural or visual” identifiers of underwriters such as logos.

Network guidelines: To clarify nuances in FCC rules and protect stations, and to prevent real or seeming conflicts of interest involving funders, PBS, NPR and other program distributors impose their own restrictions on underwriting announcements that air with national programs that they distribute:

PBS Funding Standards and Practices, as amended through Jan. 27, 2008, and still online in late 2012. Among other criteria, PBS cites a three-point “test” for proposed funding arrangements:

Editorial Control Test: Has the underwriter exercised editorial control? Could it?

Perception Test: Might the public perceive that the underwriter has exercised editorial control?

Commercialism Test: Might the public conclude the program is on PBS principally because it promotes the underwriter’s prod­ucts, services or other business interests?

Where should the line be drawn between underwriting and advertising? Opinions differ enormously, even among station managers, depending on their philosophies and potential effects.

Is “noncommercial” the best defining difference? Early in the 1980s, some public TV leaders advocated dropping the structural distinction of “noncommercial.” At their behest, in 1981, Congress asked the FCC to experiment with on-air advertising, directing the FCC to create the Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing. TCAF conducted an extended test of advertising on several stations and reported its findings, including this executive summary, in 1983.

See also separate section on Lawrence Grossman’s PTV Weekend proposal for limited advertising on public TV.

Affinity Group Coalition

Amended charter (PDF) as of August 2008, for coordinating body with representatives of various kinds of public TV stations, recognized by CPB and other national groups for purposes of consultation. Earlier versions: September 2006, August 2005.

Prologue: In October 1965, just a month before the first Carnegie Commission was formed, Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) released the Educational Television Progress Report. Magnuson, then chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, laid out the case for federal aid to public broadcasting in this report published a month before the creation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television.

Epilogue: The Carnegie Corporation revisits public broadcasting 40 years later with a symposium and report, The Meeting of Two Cultures: Public Television on the Threshold of the Digital Age, in summer 2008. Included are remarks by PBS President Paula Kerger, an essay by longtime public media consultant Richard Somerset-Ward, and a report on ideastream, Cleveland’s public media nonprofit built from the merger of WVIZ-TV and WCPN-FM.

See also Public Broadcasting Act tab

Carnegie II (the second Carnegie Commission), 1977-79

A Public Trust: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting (Carnegie II), published by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, January 1979. Carnegie II, as the commission came to be called, followed up on Carnegie I’s report a decade earlier, which led to passage of the Public Broadcasting Act and annual appropriations to the field through CPB.

Precedent for taxpayer funding of electronic media in the public interest: land-grant colleges: Advocates for taxpayer funding of public media point out a successful precedent in public policy, the Morrill Act of 1862, which endowed state universities with the value of large tracts of federally controlled land, assisting public education, including the spread of agricultural expertise.

“The Land Grant Tradition,” published in 2012 by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, successor to the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, marking the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act. APLU also published this material about the idea and the legislation.

The Communications Act covers federal regulation of wired and broadcast telecom. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School maintains extensive, free online resources on federal law and regulations. Handy if you don’t have a law library.

Authorization by Congress, original, 1967: See materials about the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created CPB, specifies its purposes and governance and authorizes it to distribute federal aid to public TV and public radio. Several changes of mandate since then are cited on this page.

Regardless of their priorities, CPB’s board and managers have limited discretion in spending the appropriation. In the Public Broadcasting Amendments Act of 1981 (part of the year’s budget reconciliation act), Congress applied a budget formula that helps keep the peace between TV and radio interests and directs more than half of the appropriation to eligible (“CPB-qualified”) local stations.

Station leaders critical of CPB’s Television Future Fund of the 1990s charged that the corporation violated the formula by redirecting millions of station allocations into research and experimentation. Currentdipped into the arithmetic.

A mandate for political “objectivity and balance”: In its 1992 CPB authorization, Congress emphasized CPB’s obligation to foster “objectivity and balance” in programs that it assists.

Presentation by Stephen Hill and Dennis Haarsager (PDF), January 2005. Hill, a music series producer, and Haarsager, a longtime station leader in both TV and radio, propose an online service that would aggregate TV and radio content in a consistent, comprehensive online offering that could win a share of the growing on-demand audience.

Audience Research Analysis publications, many written by ARA founder David Giovannoni, describe the factors that built public radio’s audience, including stations’ focus on NPR-style news and information and the proliferation of stations carrying those programs. Included in ARA’s What We Know section are numerous articles originally published in Current during the 1980s and 1990s.

Audience 98, a comprehensive report on public radio’s audience growth and composition, prepared by Audience Research Analysis for CPB, February 1999. See also Current preview story, Sept. 8, 1997.

Having It All: How Public Radio Stations Can Provide Great Service and Live Within Their Means, a study commissioned by CPB and done by Brody Weiser Burns (company later renamed BWB Solutions), November 2004.

Would-be Carnegie panels: Since the Public Broadcasting Act grew directly out of the original Carnegie Commission’s 1976 report, the commission has inspired a long line of blue-ribbon advisory bodies and report writers hoping for similar impact for public media. But few since then have had the success that President Johnson gave to Carnegie I.

Digital Future Initiative, a project of PBS, at the end of Pat Mitchell’s presidency, and the New America Foundation, Dec. 15, 1995. Full report, 133 pages, or summary, 11 pages. See also Current article.

FCC Future of Media Project report, Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Landscape in a Broadband Age, June 9, 2011.The project was led by Steven Waldman. Full report (almost 400 pages, 5 MB).

In preparation, Waldman’s FCC project held a rare workshop on public media, Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era, April 30, 2010, in the FCC’s offices, Washington, D.C. Speakers represented CPB, public media networks, independent producers, foundations, academic and policy observers. The Future of Media Project’s site includes links to speakers’ submitted remarks and a full transcript of workshop.

Action for Children’s Television v. FCC, two U.S. Court of Appeals rulings on broadcasts of indecent material — in June 1995 voiding a provision that favored public over commercial broadcasters, and in July 1995, upholding the indecency rule itself.

The project, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, was initiated by public TV’s Affinity Group Coalition and public radio’s Station Resource Group and funded by CPB. The code was planned as successor to the Wingspread Conference statement in 1984 (see below). Project directors: Byron Knight of Wisconsin Public Broadcasting and Tom Thomas of SRG, with staff support by Skip Hinton of NETA. Steering Committee chaired by Ted Krichels of Penn State Public Broadcasting.

Klan v. KWMU, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, 2000 — PDF on site of Washington University Law School, St. Louis

Political interference by Alabama Educational Television Commission: Political appointees on commission pushed for broadcast of programs promoting selected Christian views; network chief Alan Pizzato resisted, and the commission fired him. See also Current coverage:

See also tabs on Ethics and errors, Editorializing and political endorsement (banned), Indecency in broadcasts and Religion and public media

Independent producers / legislation, activity, ITVS and AIR

Opening distribution and production funding to indies: From its early days, broadcasting got most programming from station and network staffs, but for practical and principled reasons (including diversity of opinion and ethnicity) independents increasingly sell (or donate) their work to PBS, NPR, other distributors and stations, especially at the national level. Current coverage:

March 2012: a leading indie nonprofit, Kartemquin Films in Chicago, began this petition to PBS and helped win back favorable scheduling for the Independent Lens and POV series. Current story on outcome, May 2012.

Many PBS shows are or include independent productions, though the definitions of “independent” vary. Distribution vehicles devoted to indie work include:POV broadcast series, Independent Lens broadcast series, PBS Film Festival annual and online, begun in 2012.

Knight Cmsn. on the Info. Needs of Communities in a Democracy

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, website.

To address public TV’s decision-making difficulties, a majority of its stations voted to create the National Forum for Public Television Executives (“the CEO Forum”) at a Convention of Stations in Austin, Texas, on Nov. 5, 1997. Current covered the founding as well as the discontinuance of the forum five years later in July 2003.

The forum had been created in an extended process by a committee called the Core Working Group, initially appointed by America’s Public Television Stations (APTS).

Source: Countdown 97, the Core Working Group’s web site, now largely stored at this site.

Nixon administration activities, 1969-74

The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers: A Summary, 1969-74: Under the Freedom of Information Act, the staff of Carnegie II requested release of White House documents during peak conflicts between the Nixon administration and public broadcasting. This is a summary compiled and released by the Carter administration’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration a decade later. This detailed NTIA summary was published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB):

Nixon’s FCC chair backs long-term CPB funding and 1:1 match of donations, April 1, 1970: Though the Nixon administration fought the expansion of public TV journalistm, it backed the young system of stations. In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, April 1, 1970, Dean Burch, Nixon’s FCC chair, endorsed a 1:1 match of federal dollars to nonfederal contributions He and activist Commissioner Nicholas Johnson support Senate bill 3558 to reauthorize CPB funding.

Burch and Johnson also urge Congress to create a dedicated ongoing funding mechanism. Burch comments: “Too great a delay in finding the permanent financing solution will adversely affect the development of [CPB] and thus of the nation’s noncommercial educational system.”

GAO report, Dec. 21, 1984, assuring Congress that public television is not vulnerable to the financial instability that threatened public radio during NPR’s financial crisis because pubTV is much less centralized

PBS program dues cost-sharing formula: Based on PBS documents, Current explains the closely guarded PBS National Program Service dues formula. The formula determines the share of the Program Assessment (or dues) paid by each member station for PBS National Program Service programs. (Stations also pay a smaller Member Assessment for other PBS services.)

See also tabs about:
Editorializing and political support by noncommercial licensees
Indecency in broadcasts
Independence and editorial integrity
Independence / Nixon administration activities, 1969-74
Religion and public media

PTV Weekend proposal, 1997

Here are links to texts and articles about a proposal (also briefly known as P2) for a two-nights-a-week experiment with commercial advertising intended to bring new program funding to public TV. Public TV did not move forward with the proposal.

Disclosure:Current took no position on the PTV Weekend proposal. The chairman of its publishing committee, Jim Fellows, facilitated discussion of the idea, and the organization that administers the newspaper, New York station WNET, opposed it.

For groundwork of the Act, see Carnegie Commission tab. For amendments of the Act, see also CPB tab. For context, see Communications law tab.

Recommend documents for inclusion

Public Media Policybase is seeking copies of significant documents to expand this collection of basic and significant documents of U.S. public media — past, present and proposed future — to assist broadcasters, policy advocates, students, teachers and students of history.

The Policybase began as an online supplement of Current‘s 2000 edition of A History of Public Broadcasting and was compiled by Current with help from the National Public Broadcasting Archive at the University of Maryland. The archive is now incorporated in the university library’s Special Collections unit.

Thanks to those who have supplied documents, especially past NPBA curators Tom Connors and Karen King.

Where electronic files were not available, we have taken care in scanning and spell-checking texts from documents, but we cannot guarantee complete accuracy. Please notify us by e-mail if you find or suspect errors.

Please let us know if you have significant texts that you believe should be accessible here.

Congress backs FCC plan to free up spectrum, expand wireless services and reduce deficit with chanel auctions. Title VI of the Middle Class Tax Relief Act (see page 118), approved by a House-Senate conference committee, Feb. 17, 2012. The act authorizes the FCC to repack and condense the band of UHF spectrum used for TV broadcasting. By 2021, frequencies voluntarily relinquished by broadcasters would be auctioned off by the commission for consumer cellphone, emergency and other wireless services. Broadcasters that give up channels, or agree to share bandwidth with other stations, or move to VHF channels, will receive payments. See also Current coverage.

In an appropriations bill, section 632(2)(1)(A), Congress ordered the FCC to set minimum mileage separations between LPFM and full-power stations that use the adjacent, second adjacent and third adjacent channels.

SaveWCAL, a listener-donor group, contests the 2004 sale of the station by St. Olaf College to Minnesota Public Radio. They question whether the college’s windfall and MPR’s plans for a contemporary music station serve the intent of donors(Current, Nov. 5, 2007) to classical music station WCAL over the decades.

Iowa Public Radio Final Report, Bornstein and Associates, November 2004. Bornstein, who oversaw the University of Wisconsin networks before retiring and led NPR’s recovery in the 1980s, endorses a proposal to unite the stations of three state-owned universities into a statewide nonprofit network. See Current followup story, Sept. 15, 2008.